The production of beer is old in the human arts, with some historians and anthropologists of the belief that it was the need to produce grain to ferment into beer that led to the establishment of civilization thousands of years ago.
In very general terms, the production of beer involves first producing a “sweet wort.” The sweet wort is formed by the addition of water to malted and unmalted crushed grain such as, but not limited to, barley to form a slurry or mash in a mash tun. Through the action of naturally occurring enzymes this mash is then converted into the sweet wort. Subsequently, the liquid in the sweet wort is drained from the mash tun and directed to a brew kettle where hops are added. The hopped liquid is then boiled in the brew kettle to produce a “hopped wort.” The final step in the brewing process involves the addition of a yeast to cause fermentation to occur in a fermentation vessel, which in turn results in the production of alcohol.
Over the years, the foregoing general process has been tinkered with and altered by brewmasters to produce beers of differing flavors, coloring, clarity, and alcohol content. Differing pressures, temperatures, grains, yeasts, and fermentation times produce differing beers, which is inclusive of ales and lagers.
Along with the rise in the production and sale of fermented beverages came eventually the provision of restaurant services. The basic methods of providing restaurant services, including the sale of alcoholic beverages, has changed little in substance, though perhaps greatly in style, over the centuries.
Many restaurants, though not all, serve alcoholic beverages, including beers. Restaurants generally provide their customers with beer by purchasing finished product produced at a brewery, which is then shipped to a restaurant for sale, or, in a few instances, by producing the beer on site at the restaurant. The latter form of restaurant establishments are known as “brew-pubs” in the industry. In reality, the vast majority of beer is brewed by the major breweries and then transported to various restaurants and served either in individual containers or out of kegs. Some restaurants have made the large capital expenditures necessary to brew beer from start to finish on site, though their numbers are limited because of the cost involved in purchasing, operating, and maintaining a quality beer production facility in a restaurant. In addition, those restaurants that have made this investment find expansion difficult to achieve for several reasons, not the least of them being because of the cost involved in building new brewing facilities at a new location and the lack of skilled brewmasters to oversee the brewing process in the individual restaurants. Consequently, often times a successful restaurant offering on-site brewing as well as other restaurant services is unable to expand beyond a single restaurant because of the capital cost involved with establishing another on-site brewery and/or the lack of a brewmaster to oversee the brewing operation.
Another difficulty faced by brew-pubs in expanding their operations from a single site is that the quality of beer produced at varying locations can differ for a number of reasons, most prominent of them being the quality of water used to produce the beer at each site. That is, because water quality naturally varies from site to site, it is difficult—if not nearly impossible—and costly to produce a beer of the exact same taste and quality from brew-pub to brew-pub without costly processing of the local water at multiple location so as to remove it as a factor in the quality of the final product produced at each location.
Some brew-pubs have perhaps considered a central location for the production of all of their brewed product with shipment of the finished product from the central production facility to other locations, thus avoiding the issue of the large capital costs involved in setting up second and subsequent brewing facilities. A considerable difficulty of this approach, however, is the regulatory morass involved in the production and transport of alcoholic beverages in intrastate and interstate commerce.
The prior art discloses an interruption in the brewing process in U.S. Pat. No. 3,290,153 to Bayne, et al. In that patent, the brewing process is discontinued after the production of the hopped wort. The hopped wort is then concentrated by passing it through continuous film evaporators or boiling away water under high pressure to produce a wort concentrate having a solids content of about 80%. Following concentration, the wort is cooled to a temperature below 105° F. The patent then notes that the wort concentrate can be stored on site or shipped elsewhere for subsequent reconstitution and fermentation. It is unclear whether this method was ever actually implemented, but in any event, this production method is rife with difficulty, however, not the least of which is that the taste, color, etc. of beer is greatly dependent upon the quality of water used in the production of the final product. Thus, the production of beer at a different location from where the wort was originally produced using this process is subject to the production of beer of varying quality and taste at the various final production facilities or to great cost to neutralize the effect of the local water quality. In addition, the cost of producing the wort concentrate is itself expensive in that it requires multiple evaporators or equivalent equipment to produce the concentrated wort.
Another inquiry into interruption of the brewing process after production of the hopped wort is found in Homebrew Digest (http//:hbd.org/hbd/archive/2532). There, an amateur brewer questions whether it might be possible to store a small amount of wort after boiling and chilling in order to sell the stored wort to customers at a local home brew store. It is clear from the disclosure that the process had not been implemented. There are no process steps disclosed nor is any apparatus discussed. The nature of the disclosure, however, indicates that storage of small amounts of wort is contemplated with a very short transport to a “local” home brew store for subsequent storage and sale. Complications also make the proposed process non-functional for home brew stores. For instance, Department of Health regulations and inspections would greatly hamper, if not prohibit, this small scale process. The disclosure does not contemplate the commercial production of multiple barrels of wort and subsequent transportation of the wort to multiple and remote restaurant sites where fermentation occurs according to established and controlled parameters.
It is desirable to have a process and associated apparatus for the interruption of the brewing process after production of commercial volumes of unfermented hopped wort, placing the wort under storage conditions that substantially inhibit bacterial action, transporting the wort under controlled conditions to several remote locations, offloading the wort at each location under controlled conditions, and fermenting the wort at each location according to established procedures to produce a beer of singular taste and quality, ensuring that each brew is essentially indistinguishable from the first location where the hopped wort is made to each second location to which the hopped wort is transported and fermented.